Free Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovitch Page A

buses, and my plan for getting my book read and my review written before the kids got home from school. The plan had changed, and now my days ended with a book in my lap. The experience of just me and my book under the light of one lamp was like sitting before a spotlighted stage in a dark theater. The whole performance went on just for me. No intermission, no interruptions, and every word illuminated.
    Man in the Dark is a novel that imagines another world mirroring our own. Two worlds coexisting: Auster uses the device to dig deeply into what keeps us going, what keeps us participating in the motions and the emotions of life. A man, his daughter, and his granddaughter are all facing their own private heartbreaks. They are unsure of how to go on and wavering as to the necessity of even trying to go on. Why bother? And then, in the prose of a lesser-known poet, they find a single sentence that makes perfect sense: “The weird world rolls on.”
    The world shifts, and lives change. Without warning or reason, someone who was healthy becomes sick and dies. An onslaught of sorrow, regret, anger, and fear buries those of us left behind. Hopelessness and helplessness follow. But then the world shifts again—rolling on as it does—and with it, lives change again. A new day comes, offering all kinds of possibilities. Even with the experience of pain and sorrow set deep within me and never to be forgotten, I recognize the potent offerings of my unknown future. I live in a “weird world,” shifting and unpredictable, but also bountiful and surprising. There is joy in acknowledging that both the weirdness and the world roll on, but even more, there is resilience.
    The night before Thanksgiving, I had a dream. I dreamed I was in Cambridge, England, walking through the Wren Library. I ran into Anne-Marie, alive and well.
    â€œI don’t know what to read now,” I said to her. “Should I read a sixteenth-century philosopher or the new edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales that just came out? What do you think?” Just days before I’d read the deeply atmospheric and scary Man in the Picture by Susan Hill, set in Cambridge. It made sense I was dreaming about Cambridge. But where did the sixteenth-century philosopher come from? And why The Canterbury Tales ?
    In my dream, the choices I offered didn’t puzzle my sister. They only made her smile.
    Giving me that look of hers—the one where she pursed her lips and drew in her eyebrows, signaling acute brain activity—Anne-Marie said to me, “I’ll have to think about that. I’ll get back to you.” She turned around and walked away. She was wearing her Yves Saint-Laurent trench coat from the ’80s, belted tightly around her middle. She turned to wave, and then she was gone.
    When I woke up on Thanksgiving morning, I understood the world was rolling for me, asleep and awake. In its rolling, there was giving and there was taking. I was sure Anne-Marie would get back to me, philosopher or poet. Until then, I had a promise to keep.
    The next day I read Watership Down , all 476 pages of it.

Chapter 6
The Only Balm to Sorrow
    Now, lodged in the body of a living person, I could remember everything, everywhere, every time. It was as if I were on my way back, on a return journey.
    MIA COUTO,
    Under the Frangipani
    WHEN I RETURNED TO THE HOSPITAL AFTER GETTING THE CALL that my sister had died, I found my father rocking back and forth on the couch in her hospital room, repeating over and over, “Three in one night.” I had no idea what those words meant, and when I asked Natasha about it later, she didn’t know either. I wanted to ask my father, but at the same time I couldn’t take any more sadness. Jack’s sister Mary died in June after a long illness, and I felt as if I were underwater, drowning in tears. I couldn’t go to Mary’s funeral, terrified that I would submerge for good into grief and